Adding an additional physical hard drive to my MineOS environment

MineOS Turnkey
1

Hi All,

I’m fairly new to Linux platform, and all of what I’ve learnt so far has come from running MineOS from an ex-Windows computer over the last year or so. I’ve learnt so much, and found all the forums and tutorials really helpful, but often a little beyond my full understanding. Although I can usually figure it out by trial and error.

Basically, I am in a situation that I need some guidance on. Let me explain my situation, as opposed to attempt to use the appropriate technical terminology, as I’m sure this would not confuse things!

After a year of running a successful server, the PSU unit in the PC blew, and instead of hunting down a new PSU unit (as it was a pretty old machine) I just accepted my dads old Vista machine, which was essentially an upgrade in terms of RAM, processor, efficiency etc. I downloaded the latest MineOS-Node ISO, and got that all up and running. My son over the last year had worked on 2 servers (or ‘worlds’, but I never know quite when to refer to them as these separate terms) and although we’ve now made a nice new server, his friends keep asking about when ‘the old’ one will be available. It was a really creative world/server with all sorts of buildings and designated areas they’d all worked on.

I have the physical Hard drive sitting in a caddy, and connected via USB, of which the WebUI recognises when I browse in the Hardware section, but I don’t know how to add/mount this disk, and ultimately copy/move/import the world/server to run it again, and allow him/his friends to access it.

Note; We did regular backups/archives/restore points of this server if that of any help.

Could anyone give me some advice on how to achieve this task?

2

The easy way: You should be able to use the included Webmin on https port 12321 to mount and copy files. I’d say to copy the last/latest archive file from the old drive’s /var/games/minecraft/archive to the new/current drive’s /var/games/minecraft/import.

The “long” way: Not exactly sure where I’d start to explain the long way (I’ve actually never tried so don’t quote me on this) but there really isn’t a need to use the long way…

3

Thanks for your reply Jay.

However, although I understand your suggestion and copying an archive file from the old hard drive to the import folder on the new hard drive, it’s actually ‘how’ I do this which is my enquiry.

I also realised that when I mentioned WebUI in my post, I actually meant Webmin . That’s where I login and can see the disk in the Hardware section, but every time I attempt to mount it, it suggests it cannot action that request and comes out with a load of possible reasons to why this is the case.

There are a load of options availabile for mounting a physical disk/partition and its here I am obviously doing something wrong. The error varies slightly depending on which options I chose. But here is an example:

Failed to save mount : Mount failed :
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdg1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

4

Alright so I don’t exactly know where/how I’d start trying to figure out how to mount a drive containing a previous Linux install under a new Linux install on another HDD, but I have something else you can try…

  • You’ll need either a blank DVD or USB flash drive (preferably blank) with at least 2GB free space available. What you’re going to do is basically create and use a Ubuntu (Linux) LiveCD to transfer the data from the old drive to the new one…download either Ubuntu 14.04.4 or 15.10 from here and when you’re done, write the image to the flash drive/DVD (I assume you know how to already, being that you did it twice for MineOS) and when that’s complete, you’ll want to boot the server from the drive.

  • From the boot menu, select “Try Ubuntu” and wait for the LiveCD to boot. Next you’ll want to identify which drive is which (they should mount automatically after loading, and you can browse their directories to identify which is which) but from there you’ll be copying the last archives from the old drive’s archive folder directly to the new drive’s import folder.

  • You can also copy any other files you need from the drive, but you should drag them to the flash drive and not from one HDD to another, being that it can cause permission errors (based on another post) but you can drag from HDD to flash drive then from flash drive to HDD to help avoid that problem. Good luck!

1 Like
5

Ok thanks. I’ll give that a go when I get a chance, and let you know the outcome.